Dana Stabenow - Better To Rest

“Wy-”

“Moses came to see me last night,” she said.

“Wy, let me get the first-aid kit. You’ve got some whiskey in it, don’t you? I think you could use a drink, and I know I could.”

He tried to stand up and she wouldn’t let him. “Wait a minute, Liam. I know I sound crazy, but listen. Moses came to see me last night, and he told me he was my grandfather.”

“Oh.” All that meant to Liam was that the little martinet was going to be his grandfather-in-law. He could only imagine how much Moses was going to be beat up on him now. There were probably one hundred additional movements in tai chi that Moses had been saving up to torture him with, and he’d have to learn them all. “Maybe I don’t want to marry you after all.”

She laughed again, a clear, full-throated sound that rang down the airstrip like a bell. “He’s a shaman.”

“I’ve noticed,” Liam said dryly.

“No, no, listen.” She shook his hands. “Listen, Liam. I’m his granddaughter, and he hears voices.”

“Wy, I don’t-”

“He told me I was going to hear them, too.”

“-think- What? What do you mean?”

“I mean just what you think I mean. He told me that hearing the voices is hereditary in our family, that sometimes it takes a while for them to kick in. He told me the reason I made us come to the fish camp last month is because I knew Gheen was coming and that Tim was in danger.”

He looked at her and remembered how determined, how in fact implacable she had been to fly into the teeth of thirty-five-knot winds, blowing snow and fog and the year’s first winter storm. She was going to go; nothing anyone could say or do short of busting up the plane with a crowbar was going to stop her. He had been angry with her, and terrified, because he knew he’d have to go with her. “Did you?”

She rounded on him. “Of course not! I told Moses last night that all I did was follow the trail of dead bodies that crazy bastard left. It was pointing right toward Old Man Creek. It didn’t take any voices to see that; it was right there on the map!”

She looked as fierce as she sounded; there was plenty of moonlight to show him that. “That’s why you were nervous about the flights,” he said.

“What flights?”

“The one to the glacier this morning and the one to Anchorage tonight. You were looking for advice from the voices if you should fly or not.”

“Voices,” she said with scorn. “Imagine. I’m a pilot, Liam. I’m not a shaman. Besides, a shaman is a man. All the shamans I’ve known are men.”

“How many have you known?”

“That’s not the point. Okay, one, all right, Moses! But I’ve never read about a woman shaman, or heard about one, and besides, I don’t believe in any of that stuff anyway. He’s my friend, and my tai chi teacher, and it turns out he happens to be my grandfather, too.” She made a visible effort to calm down. “He’s also a drunk, and he was drunk on his ass last night. He probably didn’t have a clue what he was saying.”

He always had before. Liam kept that thought to himself.

“And besides,” Wy added, “if any voices were going to kick in they would have kicked in before this flight. They would at the very least have kicked in before we left Anchorage. I haven’t got any; I don’t care whose granddaughter I am.”

Suddenly, right over their heads, a raven cawed loudly. They both jumped. Wy leapt to her feet and shouted, “Yeah, your mother, you little black bastard!”

She marched off.

Liam stood up and brushed at the seat of his pants, searching out the cawer in the tree above. He’d been there the month before, or someone very like him, and had followed them down the river in the skiff. They would have missed the mouth of Old Man Creek if it hadn’t been for the raven.

Although it wasn’t necessarily a he. It was impossible to tell a male raven from a female raven from a distance. Liam had been making it his business to read up on ravens. As a practicing law-enforcement professional, he preferred his science straight, unencumbered by myth or legend, but it was hard to get away from either in this country. He read Bernd Heinrich and Richard K. Nelson, and he learned that Alaska Natives regarded the raven as a trickster, not a helper. You had to watch Raven or he’d steal you blind, food, home, woman, children, the sun, the moon and the stars, for that matter.

All Liam knew was that something big and black and winged had come between him and disaster three times in the last six months, and he was grateful. There was a series of soft croaks from a branch above him. He thought he caught a blue-black gleam of raven wing, a glimpse of a beady eye.

He also thought he might be going a little insane. Disney-ham was finally getting to him. He followed Wy to the plane.

She had the toolbox out of the plane and was rooting through it. She stood up as he approached, hacksaw in hand. “What are you doing with that?”

She got a plastic crate out of the back of the plane and went to the front, upended it, and climbed on top.

“Wy?”

She put one hand on the prop and rested the hacksaw on the end, to just before the bullet nonhole.

“Wy!”

She started to saw. She might even have been whistling.

“Wy!”

Karen Tompkins’ town house was on the south end of the complex, looking directly over the small boat harbor. There was a kitchen, a living room, and a dining room downstairs, and two bedrooms and two bathrooms upstairs. There was no yard in front, only two parking spaces. It was exactly like the other seven units in the building, with a narrow deck running across the front and five sets of evenly spaced stairs providing access. There was a small wrought-iron table with two matching chairs on the deck in front of Karen’s.

Inside, there was a lot of pink. The sheets on the bed were pink and satin. The towels in the bathroom were pink and fluffy. The china dishes in the kitchen cupboard had pink roses on them. The purple leather couch had pink plush accent pillows. The carpet was maroon, and the walls were hung with watercolor paintings of flowers and hummingbirds and butterflies.

The bed was king-size. So was the tub in the master bath. Two drawers of the dresser were devoted to toys intended to be played with in both, some of which raised eyebrows all around.

There was a calendar hung over the kitchen counter, with a dentist’s appointment coming up on November second, and that was about it. Envelopes were tucked into the calendar’s pocket. Diana shuffled through them. Bills, electric, gas, garbage, telephone, all due at the first of the month. An Alaska Airlines Visa bill, carrying a thirteen-thousand-dollar balance and a two-hundred-dollar periodic finance charge.

In the spare bedroom, which didn’t look as if it had seen much use, there was a plastic box with a handle on top, the size to fit letter-size files. Inside were Karen’s birth certificate, her high school diploma, her bank statements, the deed to the town house. Nothing looked out of the ordinary.

There was no clue as to who her most recent bed partner had been, but from what Diana had heard so far, you could pretty much throw a dart anywhere within the Newenham city limits and hit someone who’d spent time between Karen Tompkins’ sheets.

She had interviewed Betsy Amakuk and her husband at Lydia’s house, although Betsy was nearly incoherent with grief. She’d lost a mother and a sister within the space of two days, so Diana didn’t blame her. Her husband said they’d been home that evening, sorting through Lydia’s bills, which they’d fetched from Lydia’s house that morning, and writing Lydia’s obituary for the newspapers. Betsy had made a quick run back to her mother’s house to look for Lydia’s birth certificate to run with the obituary, and had found Karen dead on the kitchen floor. No, they couldn’t think of anyone who wished Karen harm. “She had a lot of boyfriends,” Betsy had said in an exhausted voice. “She liked men, sure. But she wouldn’t have stayed with anyone who threatened her, or hurt her.”